Christmas Goodies..

I grew up with a Mother, who would make and hand out plates of goodies to friends and neighbors, every Christmas season. I remember the homemade cookies, suckers, marshmellow/popcorn candycanes, and my personal favorite, the homemade carmels, that she she spent hours putting together. Then my dad and and all of the kids would drive around and deliver it all.

I never realized how much work she put into those plates, until I tried to do it myself. Every year, I'd make a goal to at least come up with something for the neighbors, and every year, I never followed through. This year, Nicole and I decided that we'd spend a day baking and put plates together. We made sugar cookies that the kids frosted and decorated, she made "bark" which is basically chocolate, corn syrup and saltine crackers, I was to make chocolate mint cookies, which I botched the recipe of course, and they ended up having to be thrown away. And our pride and joy, homemade chocolates. Destin headed this project up. We all painted molds with colored chocolate, which took hours. And they looked amazing. I'd never done this before, and actually had a lot of fun doing it. After we painted the molds and filled them with chocolate, we then put them outside to keep them cool. Well, we forgot about the molds and they sat out in the sun for most of the day. It wasn't super warm, but just warm enough to melt everything together, ruining all the work we had done. The big chocolate blob.
Nicole was actually able to salvage some of them and we did include them on the plates. I am proud to say that dispite all of our little snags, our Christmas goodies were a success!